We had just finished a board meeting and then we were all getting texts on our phones telling us that there was the shooting that happened in Atlanta.

The next day we said we have to be out there speaking up.

We're never seen as Americans. We are perpetual foreigners. So when something goes wrong, you want to blame the Asian American community.

It's happened with the Chinese Exclusion Act and the 1800s. It happened with the Japanese incarceration in the 1940s.

It's this constant that it must be that we are the other.

The purpose of the foundation and the mission is to create a sense of belonging and prosperity for the Asian American Pacific Islander communities,

free from violence, discrimination and slander.

Taff is in all senses of the word a startup. You have to keep trying different things until you figure out what exactly is the scalable piece of this.

We have to be a nimble startup and at the same time be a good steward of the money that's been giving to us and make sure we spend it well and do well by the community.

That's Sonal Shah, president of the Asian American Foundation. A nonprofit launched by business leaders in May dedicated to addressing discrimination against Asian Americans.

In just its first few weeks, Taff raised a billion dollars for the effort. I'm Bob Safian, former editor of Fast Company, founder of the Flux Group and host of Massachusetts Scale Rapid Response.

I wanted to talk to Sonal because businesses have often overlooked the challenges faced by the Asian American community.

Since the pandemic, hate crimes against Asian Americans have been on the rise, punctuated by the shootings in Atlanta and March that left eight people dead.

Sonal, who launched the White House Office of Social Innovation in the Obama administration, is applying the philosophy of business startups to the new effort, building networks between government, businesses and other nonprofits to amplify and speed impact.

We'll start the show in a moment. Afterward from a premier brand partner, Capital One Business.

The stat we know from Arizona is there used to be something like 20 journalists per capita and now there are three.

That's Becky Palak. For over 20 years, she'd been a newspaper reporter in Arizona. And over that time, she watched her newsroom shrink around her, which meant local issues weren't being covered.

What's going on in your city council? What's going on with your taxes? What's going on with your local streets and parks and libraries?

The problem wasn't just in Arizona and it wasn't getting better.

I kept waiting for someone to have a plan for how to solve all the problems in our industry and then I would get behind that leader and like follow their plan. And then at some point I realized I needed to do it like I needed to be my plan.

So Becky made a surprising pivot from journalist to entrepreneur will hear about that journey later in the show. It's all part of Capital One businesses look at entrepreneurs who are solving big problems at all levels of scale.

I'm Bob Safian and I'm here with Sonal Shah, the president of the Asian American foundation. So I was coming to us from her apartment in Washington DC.

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